Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Cover Reveal: Ash-Eater's Fugue, Anno 2021 by Kim Koning

A sleeping town is pulled out of the night into a fiery world of chaos. Do they know that fire cleanses the damned soul?

Rejected by her parents at birth and raised by the mad zealot in charge of the Cremona Orphanage, Chiara has always been known as the dark one. Cursed with the ability to see the future, her life has always been a waking nightmare. The future is darker than even the dark one can foretell. As the country around her becomes a battleground, Chiara’s only salvation lies in a battered old violin. As the town struggles against the death that is their destiny, Chiara must embrace her delusions to play the final requiem. The town’s fate is sealed with the haunting song of a battered old violin. Sanity shatters as music, madness and the mystical dance in a requiem to fiery chaos. The damned must die a little death for the pure to triumph. The dark one is the only one who can bring light to a fallen world.

Kim Koning

Kim is a dark fiction writer with the heart of a poet and the soul of a gypsy while the ancient rhythms of Africa, the birthplace of storytellers, courses through her veins. Wanting to be either a pathologist or a criminal psychologist, life took her on a few twists and turns while studying journalism and after a couple of meandering offshoots that did not involve fiction, fiction finally chose her when she was asked to write a short story for a NZ anthology (which was a National Award Winner). Kim now lives on the beautiful East Coast of New Zealand’s North Island and is lucky enough to call the Pacific Ocean her backyard. She can often be found wandering the cliff tops above the crashing ocean and walking through the lush farmlands that surround the area. But with a heart caught between two lands, the sunburned, ancient Africa and the lush, green islands of New Zealand, she finds her true home within the white pages covered in ink. Her fiction is caught between the dark and mysterious, the truth and the what ifs, secrets and reality, shadows and light. Kim really does see ghosts and her loved ones believe ghosts and extreme weather phenomenon follow her around. She grew up spending holidays and weekends at her grandparents’ large old farm homestead which had a hidden wing that was haunted. These early experiences with haunted homes ignited her imagination and started a spark that made her question what else is out there that we couldn’t see, what is around us observing us? Why could she see these ghosts/spirits and many others couldn’t? The spark was lit and the stories started coming as fast as she could write them down.